As the name implies, Belkin's Easy Transfer Cable for Windows Vista allows you to transfer your files to Windows Vista, easily. It'll help you to copy over all your files and settings from your shattered old XP PC to your shiny new Vista box.
Belkin Easy Transfer Cable
In the pack you get a two-headed USB cable with a soap- …

COMMENTS

Personally, I'm with the BOFH

How splendid! Does it also painlessly transfer all your old spamming & DDOSing viruses and trojans from your shagged-out old PC to your soon-to-be not-so-shiny new Vista box?

Personally, I'm with the BOFH when it comes to Vista: "Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm."

Did you post that as flamebait?

There's a couple of worthwhile comments at http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/08/belkin-easy-transfer-cable-helps-you-share-between-xp-vista-mac/ on this thing.

Most importantly - it's not any form of standard USB cable (well, bridged, yes) but (according to the comments) specially licensed by MS to work with their software. Which means no generic (e.g. unapproved) cable will work, which sounds a little like DRM, doesn't it?

Anyhoo, I'd suggest that anyone looking to buy one wait a month or two when they start hitting ebay etc. in large numbers after they've fulfilled their (one-time) purpose.

ethernet seems much faster

great idea, but in practice an ethernet seems much faster and for simplicity, a cross-over cable works well. granted that required more of an knowledge of an inner workings. however, I'd still use a cross-over cable. it's just simpler, and I've got one at home

Ethernet faster?

100Mb/s or 480Mb/s.. I'm thinking ethernet isn't faster unless you're on gigabit. And a bridged USB cable ought to be native to XP or Vista.. don't see how MS could 'license' or 'drm' this. Sounds FUD to me.

Why not just use firewire?

Gigabit ethernet needs stuffing with to be useful

Gigabit ethernet won't actually help much, although GbE does have the nice property of allowing a standard patch cable to be used to interlink the two interfaces (in fact a typical 10Base-T/100Base-TX crossover cable won't work for 1000Base-T).

The reason GbE isn't as useful as you'd hope is that the TCP buffers in Windows Xp are pitifully small at 12KB, which is adequate for dialup or a 10Base-T LAN but nothing faster or further away. When Xp came out they wanted to make it use as little kernel memory as possible, and they certainly wouldn't have been happy about the 4MB or more needed to keep a then-exotic GbE network interface card supplied with TCP data.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center have a good guide to tuning operating systems for network throughput. See http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/tcptune/

Naturally the change on Microsoft operating systems varies by service pack and requires registry devilry and a reboot.